Volume #34 Preview by Archis Foundation

Volume 34 City in a Box

Table of Contents With the exponential growth of urban populations, thousands of new towns and city extensions will be needed in the near future. While governments are seemingly in retreat, the private sector has stepped up to fill the gap. Private-sector development is nothing new, but scale and ambition are on the rise. Single companies now vie to build entire cities, and package their services so that their product can be replicated elsewhere. To tackle this complexity – of building whole cities from scratch – new organi zational models are being drafted, financial tools invented, and the dynamic between client, investor, developer, designer, builder, and end-user is fundamentally shifting.

52 The First Top-Down Palestinian City – Malkit Shoshan 56 Corporate Urban Visions – Matas Šiupšinskas and Brendan Cormier 58 The Image of a New Town 59 Tips for Building a New Town – Replicate your Product 60 The Promise of a City – Luc Speisser interview 64 Tips for Building a New Town – Create the Essence of Freedom; Not Total Freedom 65 You talking to me? – Bik van der Pol and 98weeks (eds) 81 Tips for Building a New Town – Find Justification Other than Profit 82 New City Myths – Michèle Champagne 85 Tips for Building a New Town – Design the Postcard Image 87 The Shape of a New Town 92 Becoming a City – Richard Nemeth interview 96 The Evolving Shape of New Towns – Silvio Carta, Marta González, Chiara Quinzii, and Diego Terna 102 Governing a New Town 103 Tips for Building a New Town – Satisfy your Clients 104 Notes from a City Manager – Scot Wrighton interview 110 New Town Networks – Matas Šiupšinskas 112 Outsourcing Smart – Matas Šiupšinskas and Brendan Cormier 114 Tips for Building a New Town – Don’t Sweat the Services 115 The Entrepreneurial City – Hans de Jonge 118 Dutch Planning and Asian Business Thinking: A New Synergy? – Yvonne van Remmen 121 Tips for Building a New Town – Find Multiple Ways to Profit

Editorial – Arjen Oosterman

4 5 8 10

Why Build a New Town Why Build a New Town – Michelle Provoost New Towns Since 1990 – INTI/Archis Nothing More Political – Wouter Vanstiphout

17 18 22 26 30

Four Cities in a Box PlanIT Valley – Rachel Keeton Lavasa – Rachel Keeton Strand East – Rachel Keeton New Songdo – Rachel Keeton

122 Equipping a New Town 123 Tips for Building a New Town – Own the Data 124 The Cisco Master Plan – Jean-Louis Massaut interview 128 The City that Smart Citizens Built – Dan Hill 134 Owning Big Data – Michael Keane interview 137 It’s All Cityness – Edwin Hans 140 What Is a City that It Would Be Smart? – Usman Haque

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144 Colophon

34 The Ambition for a New Town 36 New Songdo Roll Out – Jonathan Thorpe interview 40 Tips for Building a New Town – Invoke Paradise 41 Tips for Building a New Town – Stay for the Long Run 42 Soft Operations – Rosemary Lokhorst interview 46 Pipe Dreams and Real Deals – Todd Reisz

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Notes From the Tele-present Arjen Oosterman

It took awhile before Western design firms could believe that the building and design market in Asia was serious business, and also to come to grips with the ambition, scale, and speed of development. By now they understand and are trying to pick some cherries from that trillion dollar tree; the more so now that their home markets are slowing down or worse. ‘Going East Asia’ these days is not ‘only’ about delivering housing quarters, railway stations, airports, fiber networks, waste water treatment plants and what not; it extends to the delivery of complete cities. It’s already been a long time that the West has been confronting the ‘building a New Town’ theme, but today it is a business opportunity.

Cities are creators of value and wealth. But that is not their only purpose in life. They’re complex expres sions of culture and society, aggregates of knowledge, talent and expertise, platforms for individual oppor tunity and development, places to share and exchange. To approach the city as business primarily, to operate it like a company and make it perform as stock market fund, seems to miss a value or two. So, there are serious issues involved. This is more than a retreating public sector and the market stepping in. This is a question of whether we want to and can base the organization of society on capitalist principles in full; if we can allow the corporation to take over. The answer to this question may not be as simple as it seems. Western rock solid values like democracy, freedom of choice, individual integrity and let’s not forget social inclusiveness have been challenged for a while now. New technologies, new

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Volume 34

As follow up to the Privatize! and Centers Adrift issues, this Volume presents another shift: a shift in who’s taking the initiative, who’s deciding, and who’s governing when it comes to city building and city management. This shift in practice cannot be summoned up in one sentence, it has many grades and variants, but the general tendency is that companies instead of governments and their planning departments are starting to create and run cities: concept, invest ment and funding, development and exploitation – including all services – in short the full package or ‘city in a box’. That is no small thing. In fact it’s grand. The investment involved is without precedent, the risks are substantial (the world economy is not very predictable these days), and the projects are massive. One could argue that the creation of a city as a complete system is a triumph of human ingenuity. Again, there is not one formula. In some cases these cities are privately run like mini-states, as smoothly functioning alternatives to messy everyday realities. In others it is more about the creation of well-functioning economic hubs, technologically advanced ‘full service’ cities that can compete for talent and enterprise on a global market. They come in different guises: the creative indus try look of former warehouses and reused industrial buildings, postmodern new urbanist Italianate laketown romanticism, international finance modernism, and maybe we’ll see hi-tech indigenous-styled alternatives soon. But that is not the point. The point is that the relation of the individual and his or her surroundings is fundamentally changing.

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social patterns, and competing political systems have demonstrated that rock solid may not be as solid as thought. So, if companies can deliver what democratic government cannot, why worry, why bother, why complain?

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Let me give a reason or two. Maybe hubris is the first thing to tackle. Playing god is not something architects shied away from in the past, but when it comes to New Towns, we have an unhappy history to look back onto. The current generation of New Town is even more ambitious in the all-controlled life it offers. What makes current developers confident to succeed where public authority failed? More fundamental is the notion of inclusivity. The entrepreneurial city targets a middle class as consumers and inhabitants. Poorer sectors of society are included as far as needed to serve the ones that create profit. Inclusiveness and building for all is not the ambition nor in the interest of the cityin-a-box developer. And then there is a potential conflict of interest between private and public. The US could have been the first country with a nationwide network of highspeed trains, reducing CO2 emissions and pollution caused by traffic drastically. But the car industry prevented this by de-servicing complete rail lines, stations, and public transportation systems, to secure its prominent role in transportation. What is good for the company isn’t necessarily good for society. And in line with this: what society needs may not be offered by the company. Not every public service can be changed into a profit-making enter prise. Yet the quality and resilience of a society depends on these too. There is also an inherent problem. This kind of city development and exploitation is based on exclusivity for the preferred partners. It actually functions as monopoly. That is the axe at the root of capitalist principles, prescribing an open market and competition as prerequisite for its ‘best product at the best price’ promise. And then, as far as we’re seeing now, these cities can only come about and exist within certain favorable conditions. Land for free, major infra structural investments in its vicinities, etc. Lastly, we see that in all examples as presented, governance is an unsolved issue. For the immediate present it is avoided, postponed to a future when everything is up and running (and basic returns are secured). Lots of objections and second thoughts. Impor tant issues to address for governments and politics. And let’s not forget the designers who can bring important programmatic issues to the table and present models of integration that are commercially viable, yet less obvious for non-designers. All the more important now that it’s common understanding that society has to be run as a collaboration between private and public entities, and that old oppositions no longer function.

of a sudden are very visibly present in one product; in one environment. It is the condensed way these developments come together in the New Towns we present here that is so fascinating: the daring scale, the clever layered business models, not only depending on direct sales, but different types of profit making, commercial chains of hard- and software, of products and services. A sneak peek of future’s urban future? This issue started as a conference, New Towns New Territories, initiated and organized by the International New Town Institute, with the ambition to map out this development. They brought together leading figures from main players in this field of operation, gathered during a day at the NAi in Rotterdam (September 27, 2012). Most of the material included is related to this conference and INTI’s earlier inves tigations. We thank INTI’s Michelle Provoost and Paul Kroese in particular for their work and contributions. This issue also features the ‘you talking to me?’ insert, a research project in Beirut by the Dutch artists Bik van der Pol, concerning the messy reality of everyday life and the self image of the city. It functions as a reality check on what a city is. Not the ideal, but the real.

The problem for the city developers is that tendencies that already surround us to different degrees in many aspects of our lives (lack of real choice, loss of control over one’s personal data, and more), all

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Why Build a New Town In urban planning schools we are taught not to believe in building New Towns. The practice is dead, a product of tragic hubris propagated by the modernists of the twentieth century. With our dog-eared copies of Death and Life of Great American Cities, we proudly dérive around the city celebrating the ephemeral, the organic, and the diverse. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, the need for housing people has never been higher, and with governments generally in retreat, the private sector has rushed in to fill the gap, building whole cities at once. So why build a New Town? The answer is easy: to house people. The question we should be asking is: Why aren’t we paying attention? The brutal reality is we’ll need to build thousands of New Towns in the near future, as the global urban population increases, so let’s focus on making them better as opposed to digging their grave.

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Why Build a New Town?

Volume 34

By Michelle Provoost

When you think of New Towns do you think of oppres sive concrete and misguided modernism? Does it recall images of depravity from films such as A Clock work Orange, or the violence and racism captured in La Haine? Most importantly do you think New Towns are passé, a mistake we made in the past but from which we’ve now moved on? Michelle Provoost thinks there is good reason to rethink the New Town’s historical bracket. She paints a longer history of New Towns stretching to the present, one that transitions from the social democratic dreams of postwar Europe to the machinations of global neo-liberalism today.

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There once was a time when designing new cities was one of the most ambitious and urgent tasks for any urban designer and planner. The second half of the twentieth century saw a plethora of new models, ideas, and designs specifically geared towards the design of the ultimate ‘City of the Future’. The construction of entirely new integrated urban systems and the writing of technocratic and ideological books on how to build new cities culminated in the building of hundreds of New Towns in Western Europe, the US, and the new nation states of post-colonial Africa and Asia. Now, for the last decades, the subject has all but disappeared from architectural discourse. In Western Europe the first and foremost condition for building new cities – economic growth – has disappeared; the extension and densification of existing cities has taken its place. Also the megalomaniacal belief in the future that reigned during the 1960s has vanished, diminishing the need for visionary urban utopias. On top of that, the New Towns of the postwar era have proven to be somewhat of a disappointment. Being seen as concentrations of social problems – living proof of how modernist planning has failed – they pose the question: is it even possible to create a city from scratch? All this makes it easy to proclaim that we should never again build New Towns. But still, they are being built. While relatively mod est numbers of new cities are emerging in Latin America (where Hugo Chavez has accommodated his social hous ing program in New Towns) or Africa (Tanzania, Ghana, Angola), there is an astonishing series of huge new metropolises underway in Asia. While the numbers are hardly fixed, the predictions are that China will plan four hundred cities and in India it is estimated that two hundred cities are necessary to absorb the predicted demographic growth.1 Ironically, many of these cities are planned or designed by Western architecture firms, which leaves us with a paradox: because nowadays the designing of New Towns is no longer on the agenda in the West nor a part of our architectural thinking and urban ideology, the topic has all but disappeared from architectural edu cation and publications. We might even go so far as to say that the architectural and planning elites, the ones who dominate the design debates, are in general not very interested in New Towns. In the twenty-first century, the architectural debate, when applied to urban matters, is much more animated by the massive unplanned migra tion to cities, by terrifying statistics and fascinating images coming from the ‘self organized’ megalopolises of the developing world. While big architecture firms are designing entire cities and constructing architectural icons ex nihilo in green fields, ‘their’ schools theorize mostly about the inability to plan urbanization, and offer up instead tactics of architectural acupuncture and bottom-up urban politics. Social democratic cities Thanks to the West’s twentieth century New Town boom, there already exists a huge body of knowledge concern ing New Town planning – on both the designs and the mistakes that have been made – which can be useful for future generations of cities elsewhere. Indeed some of the reasons behind both waves of city building are com parable, then and now; the demographic growth, the ris ing middle class, and the exponential rise in the standard of living are equally present nowadays in Asia as in the postwar period in Europe. However, other circumstances

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By Rachel Keeton

Location Warasgaon Lake, Mose Valley, Mulshi Block, Pune District, Maharashtra State, (between Pune and Mumbai) Country India Size, total area Approximately 100 square kilometers Founded 1999 (Lavasa Corporation Ltd. is originally registered as Pearly Blue Lake Resort Private Limited Company) Founders/Initiators Aniruddha Deshpande and Sharad Pawar 2012 Status Under construction (Phase II has begun, Phase I is complete and sold out) Expected completion 2020 Planned population Approximately 300,000 (with two million tourists per year) Government (public) investment nothing Private investment 31 billion dollars (USD) Main investors Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) holds 65 percent through HCC Realty, LM Thapar Group, Venkateshwara Hatcheries, plus 35 percent minority shareholders Urban Planning HOK International Ltd., Integron, Development Design Group Incorporated Architecture Hafeez Contractor

Lavasa is a group of five ‘town centers’ built around the shores of Warasgaon Lake, outside of Pune. The area has been developed as a pedestrian-friendly, upper- and middle-class alternative to Pune’s bust ling urbanism. Mediterranean facades and lakefront cafés give the development a resort-like atmosphere, causing many critics to question the project’s social inclusiveness. Others argue that Lavasa is simply meeting a market demand. There is no doubt that India is in need of new cities, but is Lavasa a viable model for future Indian urbanization?

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In a country with no structured urban planning at the national scale, it is purely market demand that drives the construction of New Towns and cities in India. Over the last eight years, the national government has become weaker while the state governments have taken on more regulatory power. This shift has caused much confusion (not to mention legal problems) for large-scale developers trying to get approval for various projects. Because there are basically no clear planning regulations in place, almost all of the urban growth now happening is the result of private developers. Despite India’s obvious need for new cities and townships, the difficulties involved in building legally make any new development extremely ambitious. Much of the new urbanization is taking place along the major industrial corridors (the Mumbai-Pune Corridor, the Mumbai-Delhi Corridor and the BangaloreChennai Corridor). While this does answer a very urgent need for housing, the main problem with this unregulated expansion is that many of the new townships are being built on agricultural land. Reducing the nation’s cultiva table land will have dire consequences for a nation already facing a serious food crisis. Lavasa also springs from India’s exploding demand for new housing and work environments. Unlike these booming corridors, however, Lavasa is the brainchild of a single man: City Corporation Ltd.’s managing director Aniruddha Deshpande. In 1999, the verdant site on the shores of Warasgaon Lake was originally suggested to Deshpande by Union Cabinet Minister of Agriculture and Nationalist Congress Party president, Sharad Pawar. Since then, Pawar has maintained an interest in the groundbreaking project, calling it a shared vision with Deshpande.1 In 2000, Lavasa Corporation Ltd. (originally called the Pearly Blue Lake Resort Private Limited Company) launched their plan for a business hotel to be developed on the picturesque site sixty-five kilometers outside of Pune. When the company turned public in 2003, Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) Chairman and Managing Director Ajit Gulabchand joined the project, becoming the main investor with a sixty-five percent stake through his subsidiary HCC Realty. HCC is India’s largest heavy civil engineering construction company and the largest tunneling contractor in Asia. According to Gulabchand, the massive private development is an out growth of their previous infrastructural work, and an an swer to experts’ claims that India will need to build at least five hundred new cities to accommodate the country’s mass internal migration from rural to urban centers.2 From this humble start, the project has snowballed into a sprawling city for 300,000 residents and an estimated two million tourists per annum. Lavasa is now under construction as a complete new hill city containing five town centers. The first two are already completed: Dasve (2010) and Mugaon (2012). In total, the five town centers – Dasve, Mugaon, Sakhr, Wadavli, and Dhamanohol – are planned across the lush, green hills snaking around sixty kilometers of lakefront property. Together, these centers make up one of the largest urban developments in India. Dasve, the first town center, acts as the develop ment’s prime residential space, with mixed housing from studio apartments to luxury villas. The colorful lakefront architecture is finished in reds, yellows, and oranges, with a two-kilometer promenade stretching along the shore. Cafés, restaurants, boutiques, and galleries line the walkway, giving the area a Mediterranean atmosphere.

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The smooth, undecorated facades and wrought iron balcony railings are almost Italianate. Further up the hills, a country club, water sports facilities, a museum, an art center, hotels, and resorts cater to a growing tourism sector. A commercial business park, convention center, and town hall, act as the operations heart of the town center, with schools and universities placed in the valley between two hills. Mugaon, the second recently-opened town center, lies about eight kilometers from Dasve. In addition to resi dential and commercial space, Mugaon is more focused on employment. This town center has an IT park, R&D facilities, biotechnology centers, light industries, film production and animation studios, management institutes, and various sports academies. Mugaon opened in late March 2012, with a long waiting list of interested buyers. The third town center to be developed, Dhamanohol, will be the most luxurious area, with a string of villas running along the hill front and an eighteen-hole golf course designed by Sir Nick Faldo. The other town centers will follow the lead of Dasve and Mugaon, with mixed housing, working, and recreational spaces. One of the most popular criticisms leveled at the project has been the claim that Maharashtra political bigwigs have bought property in Lavasa and that the development caters only to the wealthy. Ajit Gulabchand responded directly to these accusations, saying: “No, I don’t think [local politi cians have bought property there]. We have a very clean and open system of Customer Relationship Management. You apply, you buy it and you move forward. Politicians tomorrow may have a place there – why not? But if you think they’ve been given [properties] for any favors, no.”3 In fact, the apartments in Mugaon alone range in price from 63 to 70 dollars per square foot (depending on location and size), and range in size from 550 square feet to 2,000 square feet.4These prices are comparable to similar apartments for sale in downtown Pune. Still, even the studio apartments are by no means attainable for the average chauffeur earning 2,000 rupees a month. Since its conception more than a decade ago, Lavasa has attracted both accolades and critique. The project has garnered international awards for implement ing the principles of New Urbanism and bio-mimicry, but Lavasa has also been the target of a sustained media attack. Much of this controversy stems from Lavasa’s unstable relationship with state and national governments. At the beginning, the Maharashtra government sup ported the project and granted environmental clearance for the project within two months of the company’s application. The national government intervened in 2005, claiming Lavasa was in violation of 1986 Environmental Protection Act. Charges of illegal land acquisition were also investigated, but both were later dropped.5 Between 2010 and 2011, the project’s messy entan glement with the Ministry of Environment and Forests stalled work on Lavasa, costing HCC 360,000 dollars per day while work was halted. Lavasa Corporation Ltd. has consistently denied claims of illegal operations. In a public statement released in April 2012, they indicated that Lavasa was being singled out by a bloodthirsty media: “Time and again, allegations have been leveled against Lavasa. These are based on misconceptions. Whilst we suspect lack of clarity and understanding of the facts, we also at times, sense an element of mala fide intent amongst some detractors.”6 Despite Lavasa’s headline-grabbing history, the project is very popular with would-be residents: Phase I

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is completely sold out and Phase II properties are being snapped up almost as soon as they are available. The Mediterranean waterfront architectural style, pedestrian walkways, galleries, courtyards, and cafés suggest a very different lifestyle from the density of neighboring Pune or Mumbai, and this style has been extremely wellreceived by buyers. Attention to the specialized social requirements of creating a ‘city from scratch’ is also evident in Lavasa’s ‘Code of Citizenship’. This document, given to all new residents, helps raise awareness of expectations and responsibilities. Among the regulations spelled out in the document are a provision against flowerpots on external ledges and a warning that “overconfidence [in servants] may lead to pilferages.”7 It’s hard to argue against the most basic underpinnings of the Lavasa project: the development meets a very real market demand. Middle class families with money to spend are attracted to many aspects: safety, a picturesque setting, clean streets and a coherent architectural character give Lavasa an almost resort-like atmosphere. And much like a resort, the squalid homes of the urban poor are nowhere to be seen. While in Pune and Mumbai rich and poor live cheek by jowl, in Lavasa, it’s easy to forget your less-successful countrymen. The unreality of this sheltered community pricks our Western planning preoccupation with social democracy and mixed-income housing, but in India, Lavasa is meeting a market need.

1 Pawar’s involvement has been the root of much of the controversy

surrounding the project. When the company was originally look ing for investors they approached Sadanand Sule (Pawar’s sonin-law), among others. Sule and his wife, NCP MP Supriya Sule, owned twenty percent of the company between 2002 – 2004. According to Deshpande, “We did not realize the implications of Sule’s investments and the controversies that would follow.” See: ‘The Lavasa project is a vision shared with Sharad Pawar: Aniruddha Deshpande.’ Daily News and Analysis, Dec. 26, 2010. 2 Prof. C.K. Prahalad, author of Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, has claimed that India will need a minimum of five hundred new cities to house growing urban populations. In 2010, McKinsey Global Institute published the report ‘India’s urban awakening: Building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth’, in which they claimed that “India’s urban population [will soar] from 340 million in 2008 to 590 million in 2030 (…) To meet urban demand, the economy will have to build between 700 million and 900 million square meters of residential and commercial space a year.” (At: http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/ Urbanization/Urban_awakening_in_India) 3 P. Vaidyanathan Iyer ‘The Environment Ministry does not have measurable standards. So how do you know what and whom to deal with?’ The Indian Express. Jan. 9, 2011. 4 See: Lavasa Press Release, ‘Lavasa launches Mugaon – its second town’, Saturday, March 24, 2012 5 In September 2002, Lavasa Corporation Ltd. (then called the Lake City Corporation) signed a thirty-year lease agreement with the Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation (MKVDC), the irrigation department of the Maharashtra govern ment. MKVDC was then under the direction of Sharad Pawar’s nephew, Ajit Pawar, causing a media firestorm about nepotism and conflicts of interest. The water rights given to the company under this agreement became a matter of litigation in 2011. 6 The statement was released to the public and posted on the Lavasa website. See: http://www.lavasa.com/high/facts.aspx 7 Citizen Handbook [Brochure]. Lavasa Corporation Ltd. (2011). Lavasa pp. 6-7.

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Site for Lavasa

Bhoini

Dasve Mugaon

200m

Warasgaon Lake

500m

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govt. forest Govt. Forest mandatory open space Mandatory Open space residential Residential commercial Commercial hotel Hotel Public semi-public public semi-public (facilities) Other housing other housing Open space open space Park park Water water Future developments future developments Unspecified unspecified

Warasgaon Lake

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Photos: Newforma

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View of Dasve Village in Lavasa with architecture inspired by Portofino, Italy

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Tips for Building a New Town

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Invoke paradise Your New Town needs to offer something your customer can’t find anywhere else. The highest ideal is paradise. But paradise is a slippery term, culturally tied to the customer’s present conditions: their desires, the things they lack, the things they want. Paradise can also be seen as the antithesis of nuisance; it is reactionary. So identify the nuisance your customer is faced with and offer the opposite. In India it’s crowded streets, mixed smells, and chaotic views. In America it’s suburban malaise, isolation, and monotony. So offer the Indian an American suburb, and offer the American a vibrant Indian bazaar.

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Tips for Building a New Town

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Stay for the long run To create that full-fledged city product that you’ve promised, it will take time; twenty to thirty years at least. To satisfy that promise you’ll have to be invested for the long run. To recoup your costs, you’ll also have to stick around a while. Rather than think of this as a liability, build in profit mechanisms that will keep your coffers full well after the point-of-sale, or retain a form of long term ownership e.g. by renting out real estate or by acquiring and retaining equity ownership.

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The Rawabi sales center

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Physical model of Rawabi

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Photos: Martina Petrelli

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View of Rawabi under construction

Rawabiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hilltop location makes it unique for Palestinian development

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The Image of a New Town In real estate they say location is everything, but for New Towns image is key. How do you convince someone of your product and of the commitment to live there before itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s even been built? While older cities have reputation to go on, New Towns rely on branding as their method of persuasion. Deciding on the image and the brand is then one of the most strategic phases of any New Town design. Everything you do after will have to follow suit. Once a brand promise has been made, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s up to the company to deliver.

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Tips for Building a New Town

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Replicate your product No respectable businessman would manufacture a single pencil and then call it quits. If youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re going through the effort of building an entire city, you might as well figure out how you can do it twenty more times. In planning your New Town, take note of the entire process. Figure out how that process can be packaged and sold.

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Tips for Building a New Town

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Create the essence of freedom; not total freedom People want to feel free, but they also want their neigh足 bors to play by certain rules. To accommodate this double bind, you have to create the essence of freedom, while building in some necessary controls. On the one hand you can create a successful branding campaign imbued with ideas of freedom, transformation, and self-actualization; at the same time, you can get your customers to sign a restrictive covenant insuring that everyone paints their front door the same color. People are surprisingly willing to make these trade-offs when communicated well.

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You talking to me? Bik van der Pol & 98weeks, Beirut

TABLE OF CONTENTS

P. 1 INTRODUCTION P. 2 INTRODUCTION TO THE RIDES EXCERPT: HISTOIRE DE BEYROUTH P. 4 RIDE 1 INVENT THE PUBLIC P. 6 RIDES 2–4 P. 7 THE PLEASURE OF UNMOVING P. 9 RIDE 5

P. 10 RIDES 6–9 P. 11 RIDE 10 RIDE 11 P. 12 RIDE 12 P. 13 RIDE 13 THE WHOLE OF LEBANON IS MINE P. 16 COLOPHON

You talking to me? is a workshop project with Beirut as the place of action, portraying the city and more specifically the reality of its public space through the eyes of service drivers. The service is a particular form of public transport in the city, often operated by private car owners, and can be regarded as a social place, as a carrier and interface of public voices, often across generations. This city’s vacuum, caused by the ruptures and discontinuities of a protracted civil conflict and its ensuing destruction and anarchic reconstruction, is partially filled

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to work a lot and make a lot of money. Some of them were really famous. Now there’s no more tailors left. Over there used to be the Jewish souks. There are some Jews left but very few. Not more than 65 people. There were thousands, living in the Jewish quarters. They emigrated to Israel, to France. My neighbor David was Jewish. And my brother was in love with his sister. Most of them really went to Israel. But in the end they are all Lebanese originally. There is the synagogue. It has been restored, but it’s empty. In Saida there used to be a community too. Fifty percent of the property there is still owned by Jews. Well, you know we were never sectarian in our time; there was no East and West in Beirut. This whole area was mixed. Muslims and Christians were living in the same buildings. We had no discrimination. We used to be friends among each other from different religions, no one used to ask what is the religion of the other.

want to buy – Why would I go to a supermarket and not buy? – You said that you wanted a public space but that you didn’t want to shop! I mean even a ride in this car will cost you money. You have no other choice but to go downtown – If I go to a café downtown, I’ll have to spend money – You are coming to Lebanon and you don’t want to spend money? – I want to see the city but I don’t want to pay – Zara is a public space. You can go to Zara and not buy anything, copy the manikins and buy them at a cheaper place – Can you drop me off a bit farther? – At Zaitunay Bay? – Is it a public space? – Yes. 7

Zaitunay Bay, standing by the street. Hello, I would like to go a public space – Where? – A public space, space for all people – [Silence] … I don’t know where you want – Perhaps I should walk, thanks anyway. [car drives off] 8

Rides 6-9 Passengers: Mirene, Maxim 6

Rue Pasteur, Gemayze, standing by the sidewalk. How much for a public space? – In Beirut? – Yes – I can take you to downtown – Downtown is more of a shopping place – Just jump in – But I can’t pay more than a service – I’ll take you for five thousand – Where? – I’ll show you around and drop you wherever you like – Fine…So where do you go if you want to go to a public space? – I don’t go to public spaces. I only go out at night – To bars you mean? – Yes, downtown… There is the supermarket TSC. It’s cheap and you can just look around if you don’t

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Manara, standing by the sidewalk. Hello, I would like to go a public space – What do you mean? – A place accessible to all – Get in. You mean a coffee, a shopping area, something like that? – No, somewhere free – Raouche? – Are there other public spaces in Beirut? – I can’t take you around looking at public spaces with just one service fee, sorry – Where are you going? – I’m going to the Kuwaiti embassy – (passenger, woman, in her fifties) do you know where that is? – Yes – If you want to go a public space in Beirut, where do you go? – To be honest, I don’t know Beirut that well…but I don’t really get your question – I mean a place where all people can go – Yes, but I need to understand what it is you

want to do? Drink coffee, meet someone, buy clothes? – I just want to sit and look at people and read – Oh, I see, that kind of place where you just sit and read – Yes – (woman) Yes, a place where she can go, sit, and read. Where she can forget her pain – You mean a place like Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, something like that? – What is that place, over there? – Here they sell gelato – Ok, I’ll get down here, thanks. 9

Ramlet el Baida, standing by the sidewalk. I would like to go to a public space – Jump in. Where to? What do you mean by a public space? – A space where all people can go, and it’s for free – Downtown? A café? Just jump in – Service? – Yes. Tell me sweetie, what exactly are you looking for? A garden? You can go to Sanayeh, sit there, it’s free. There are trees, and birds – Do you think the service is a public space? – Yes, but go to the Sanayeh Garden, it’s better, there are women, girls, men. There is a nice place. You just walk in; it’s the Arab University. But don’t let anyone know that you are not a student. There is a garden and nice coffee, but don’t speak to anyone. It’s the best public space you can find here; there are no loutish boys around. I’ll drop you there. It’s clean. In public spaces there are thugs. – Where do you go if you want to go to public space? – Outside Beirut. Here I don’t go out, in any case I spend all my days in the streets! Here is the Cola Station. You can go everywhere from here – Ok, I’ll get out here – Yes, it’s better if you walk. God be with you. If you go straight, you’ll reach the garden.

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Ride 10 Passengers: Liesbeth, Jos Can you bring me to the green line? – All the way? – Yes – Ok, get in – Is this the green line? – Yes; the former frontline. No-mans-land. It looked like a jungle in the war. Sometimes wide, sometimes narrow. There used to be villages here. Lots of green spaces. This is Taghouni Square. It is the point where the different communities and religions are confronted. They are divided by that pine tree park over there – there? – Yes. The park is closed. Nobody can go in. People damage the trees, they say. That place over there used to be a place where you could have the worst coffee and the worst donuts. It was always packed. That was the meeting place for the young couples from different communities. Because they could not meet in their own area, and this place was a good place to meet. People were ordering coffee and donuts and not touching them. People meet and connect what is divided. Love, yes! It does miracles! Now people do not communicate anymore. They decided to stop talking. A lot of what I tell

you is not true. It is a lie. Beirut is a place where people make up a lot of things. Not totally untrue... also reality, but not true. That makes life more interesting – All these buildings are empty – They are unfinished. We have a lot like these. Sometimes people left. They sell everything; take the money and leave. You see many people on the streets here that do nothing. But they are not doing nothing. They watch. If strange people pass, they will warn their friends and they’ll watch them too. That street vendor with the fruits, you see him? He might not be a street vendor, but a neighborhood watch. People keep an eye on each other. Here on the right you also see what is left of the green line. You see all the trees there? How big they are? They are original from the time of the green line. That is how it used to look. Jungle. You could not go in. You needed a machete to go through it. We are almost at the end of the line. Here on the right side is a hotel. Look in, you’ll see the entrance and the stairs in the light; you see? Hold on, I’ll stop for a minute and tell you about it. Today this is a

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very cheap hotel but it used to be very fancy. Presidents used to stay here. Communication did not stop during the war. There was trade in three major things: stolen merchandise, drugs, and prostitutes. The fighters in the war needed this all, these three things. You could enter this hotel from both sides: it has two entrances, or exits. If you would go up the stairs you would be able to see the entrance at the other side too. Fighters would come here. They had to leave all their weapons at the gate of either entrance. This was a place of passage. Here is another donut shop; a new one. American. Dunkin’ Donuts. The coffee is still bad as well as the donuts. Expensive too. But lovers still meet here. Ok, you’ll get off here? Have a good night, nice talking to you. Ride 11 Passengers: Ala, Garin Is this a public beach? – Yes, but it is very dirty. The clean beaches are in Jounieh, Maameltein, Batroun, Saida, and Tyr – But you have to pay for these beaches – Yes, but they are the good ones. Free beaches are dirty. No one takes care of them.

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Image: HOK

Lavasa scheme by HOK

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Image: Kohn Pedersen Fox

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Songdo International Business District Scheme by Kohn Pedersen Fox & Associates

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By Dan Hill

Smart cities promise to do all the work for us. Millions of sensors embedded throughout the city, means we’ll never have to touch a light switch again, or feed a parking meter, or drive our cars for that matter. But is this necessarily a good thing? Does the passive citizen make for a good city? As we fran tically wave our hands in the air, hoping to trigger the motion sensor for the boardroom lights, Dan Hill makes the case for the active engaged citizen – as the only way to make our cities truly smart.

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Expo 2010 Shanghai gave us numerous insights into the state of contemporary urbanism, not all of them good. Several of the more intriguing aspects were not to be found in the glamorous national pavilions, but in the massive shed-like corporate pavilions, hosting General Motors, Cisco, Broad, and the China State Shipbuilding Corporation among others, and designed to convey their vision of the theme ‘Better City, Better Life’. In one such hangar, General Motors screened a sci-fi movie depicting a future city in which cars are the organizing principle; projected in a vast theater with moving rollercoaster seats. Unsurprisingly, the IT corporations preferred to see IT as central to the future of the city. While Cisco’s movie had a strikingly similar plotline and mise-en-scène to that of General Motors, with IT it’s seemingly harder to inte grate rollercoasters. So the centerpiece of Cisco’s pavilion was a mocked-up ‘urban control center’, a NASA Mission Control-like environment but for urban processes. The idea, common to most smart city visions, is that a sensor-strewn urban environment will elicit Big Data about the city, from which one might optimize a more responsive urban infrastructure whilst engendering mass ‘behavioral change’ through feedback loops directed at citizens. This is all, on the surface at least, apparently motivated by a desire to create more sustainable cities, through the making of more efficient cities. Seems like a reasonable idea. Skip forward a couple of years to the New Towns New Territories conference in Rotterdam, where the New Songdo City project is being discussed as an exemplar of the smart cities movement – a project in which Cisco is a major partner. Lacking the flash of the faux-urban control room from the Shanghai Expo, the presentation from developer Gale International failed to resonate with the audience, nor did Cisco’s director convince much. While NAi director Ole Bouman bravely, and correctly, suggested we need to suspend our disbelief and lay aside our cozy European views as to what cities might be, there was enough there to question what the current trajectory of the smart cities vision means for urbanism; European, Asian, or otherwise. Songdo, we have a problem To see one aspect of the problem with Songdo, let’s look at its apartments, sitting in their over-scaled towers separated by over-scaled roads. Each apartment is outfitted with Telepresence, a Cisco product that allows for high-quality video communication. When reviewing the promotional literature, we read Stan Gale suggesting that equipping the space with pervasive Telepresence might “take anxiety out of where do I meet, need to be?” Sorry, is this a problem? Who gets anxious about this? Telepresence is currently best-in-class, and fairly astonishing quality for videoconferencing, but it is an entirely neutered experience compared to meeting in person. Meeting different people in different places is one of the joys of urban living; one of its clear advan tages. A good city is replete with a variety of spaces and scenarios in which to conduct a business meeting, grab a coffee, chat through an idea, share your problems, lazily read a book. The idea that dealing with physical space and finite time is problematic might actually reveal a deeper issue that a particular culture has with these ‘constraints’ on humanity. We can pick apart another error at Songdo: a lack of understanding of, or allowance for, the different layers

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The City that Smart Citizens Built

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of change regarding domestic technology in domestic spaces. Put simply, domestic or personal technology tends to move extremely rapidly, whereas the fabric of domestic and personal spaces does not. While Cisco and Gale might state that “building a city and deploying tech at the same time is more efficient”, this is from the builder’s perspective, and will leave the users of the space with a potential problem when they try to unravel these layers at a later date. In other words, what happens when someone wants to uninstall Telepresence and use Facetime or Skype instead? The average citizen would not think of uninstalling their building’s drainage systems, but installing and uninstalling software is now an every day activity. Literally hardwiring urban services to a particular device or a particular operating system is a recipe for frustration, not efficiency. Put simply, city fabric changes slowly yet technol ogy changes rapidly. The key, which we can draw from Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn and other texts, is to enable these layers to move naturally at their different rates. There is a worrying lack of thought about adapta tion in this desire to install the consumer tech layer as a core building service. Zooming out of that Songdo apartment, we might observe a Cisco executive noting that their company’s value is directly linked to the volume of internet traffic, and that building a city like Songdo, networked to the hilt, should increase that traffic. This has echoes of that earlier era of technology-led urbanism, when companies like General Motors were accused of covertly coercing a city like Los Angeles to remove its tram lines – the largest streetcar network in the world – whilst lobbying for free ways and road building on a vast scale as part of an eco nomic shift towards cars. The contemporary Los Angeles is now faced with a near-impossible task of unpicking these decisions. Infrastructure companies, whether cars and highways, or screens and routers, look to increase traffic. It is in their interest. We can hardly blame them for trying, but we should not so blithely and carelessly let it drive urban strategy as it did fifty years ago.

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Why not the inefficient city? Both approaches – the smart city and the automotive city – are driven by a desire for control in order to pro duce ‘efficiency’, and focus on second order outcomes: energy, buildings, infrastructure, mobility – none of which are the starting points for cities. The city’s primary raison d’être is to be found amidst its citizens. There is much more to urban life than efficiency. In fact, many of its primary drivers – culture, commerce, community, conviviality – are intrinsically inefficient, or at least tangential to the idea of efficiency. Can a city be smart and inefficient at the same time? When it comes to obsessing over efficiency, we have a bit of previous history here. Have another look at a book like Brian Richards’ New Movement in Cities, from 1966. It’s actually a sharp, intelligent, forwardthinking book, featuring diagrams by Warren Chalk and Ron Herron of Archigram-fame, and with a relatively strong dose of humane urbanism, but it is soaked in the technocratic stance of the time. It might purport to be solving problems for citizens, yet citizens barely feature. In a short passage on getting projects done, Richards describes the necessary players involved in decisionmaking, and citizens are conspicuous by their absence, amidst the engineers, planners, architects, and occasionally politicians.

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New Movement, in focusing almost entirely on mobility, this second-order aspect of cities, eventually reveals an emphasis on unproductive efficiency rather than productive inefficiency. Smart cities have exactly the same problem. How could we develop a vocabulary, a dialogue, about how a city could be inefficient and yet be productive, delightful, and engaging? A dialogue about how inefficiency is at the heart of human commu nities and endeavors? The year of the crowd We must look elsewhere for inspiration, for it seems that smart city visions tend to be missing the most important part: smart citizens. Fortunately, there are suddenly signs of smart citi zens everywhere. Social media, and its dynamics outside of social media, have been adopted and adapted in the last few years to enable engaged and active citizens to organize rapidly and effectively; a network with a cause. Occupy Everywhere is part-enabled by Twitter, just as Facebook helped tip over various perturbation points that fuelled the Arab Spring. We also see it behind a flurry of crowd-sourced crowd-funding platforms, driven by the exponential growth and increasingly disruptive success of Kickstarter. But do these enable more com plex decision-making? Isn’t this where Occupy falls over, or the Arab Spring gets wintry? There are a few dots on the radar that describe systems that might enable a more sustained form of engagement. While they borrow the dynamics, modes, and functionality of social media, they needn’t rely on them, and all preference a form of public, physical engagement with urban fabric. Through the lens of democratizing urban planning, we see examples like Sub-Plan in the UK and Tallinna Planeeringute Juhend in Tallinn: simple, user-centered guidebooks explaining how to exploit loopholes in urban planning legislation to more creatively and proactively rework your city. We can see movements like Friends of Arnold Circus in London, where the community has brokered a deal with its cash-strapped municipal govern ment such that local maintenance is a shared responsi bility. The outcome is that what used to be a dilapidated, syringe-strewn, rusty Victorian bandstand is now an active and well-tended community garden. Similarly, in Berlin, we see the residents of Schöneberg creating and maintaining their own planter boxes outside their apart ment blocks, sometimes asking the city government for permission, sometimes not. As each apartment block is different, the streets become patterned with a playful expression of Berlin’s rich diversity. It’s an entirely informal urbanism, taking root in the cracks left by urban planning departments and city governance. But does it scale beyond the window-dressing of tactical planter boxes and bandstands? In Helsinki, Ravintolapäivä [Restaurant Day] started in 2011 and now runs every few months, with hundreds of diverse pop-up restaurants peppering the streets, effortlessly circumventing the city government by exploiting legal grey areas or simply relying on strength in numbers, common sense, and clear public demand. Created in response to overly restrictive, cumbersome, and outdated legislation, the festival was devised and organized by a small group of friends coordinated via Facebook. The resulting Ravintolapäivä was essentially a set of instructions, and you can’t arrest a set of instruc tions. Consequently the City, the biggest bureaucracy

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Colophon Volume 34

Contributors

VOLUME Independent quarterly for architecture to go beyond itself

ARE ARchitecture REsearch (Silvio Carta, Marta González) is an office based in Rotterdam dedicated to the understanding and design of contemporary architecture by means of studies, research, and projects. Michèle Champagne is a Canadian designer and writer who bridges the gap between aesthetics and editorial. Now based in Toronto, she recently spent three years in Amsterdam with Droog, Metahaven, Mediamatic, Sandberg Institute, and VPRO. michelechampagne.com Marijntje Denters is a researcher at VPRO Broadcasting Company. Chiara Quinzii Diego Terna Architecture is an office based in Milan practicing architecture, urbanism, and research. It works in a wide range of projects, supported by publishing, criticism, and didactics. Edwin Hans is involved in and around architecture. His main interest is in the relationship between cities and digital technologies and how we can move from urban design to service design. Usman Haque is director of Haque Design + Research Ltd and the founder of Pachube (now known as Cosm.com), a real-time data infrastructure and community for the Internet of Things. Dan Hill is a designer and urbanist and the current CEO of Fabrica. Hans de Jonge is professor of Real Estate Management and Development at the Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, and CEO of Brink Group, the Netherlands. Michael Keane is a senior partner at K2S Advisors, which focuses on the interaction of finance, technology, and infrastructure. Prior to co-founding the firm, Michael was Chief Financial Officer of Living PlanIT, the leading smart city platform software company. Rachel Keeton is an American architect and writer. She is the author of Rising in the East: Contemporary New Towns in Asia and currently works as a researcher for the International New Town Institute. Paul Kroese is an architect and works as strategic advisor and project manager for the International New Town Institute (INTI). Rosemary Lokhorst is Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at Living PlanIT, responsible for effective management and strategic development of the company’s strategic direction and partnerships as well as the continuous improvement of the Group’s commitments to excellence. Jean-Louis Massaut is the Director of Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities in Dubai. Previously he helped manage Cisco’s involvement in Songdo. Richard Nemeth is a managing principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox with over 23 years of architectural experience. Since joining KPF in 1998, he has worked on a wide range of project types throughout 5 continents, including large mixed-use complexes, supertall towers, and master plans for new sustainable cities. Michelle Provoost is a partner in Crimson Architectural Historians and the director of the International New Town Institute. Todd Reisz is an architect and writer. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in urban studies at Yale University. Yvonne van Remmen is senior program manager at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment. Malkit Shoshan is an Israeli architect based in the Netherlands, currently developing her Phd dissertation at TU Delft, which focuses on the transformation of army bases and aid compounds into civic infrastructure. Shoshan is the author and mapmaker of Atlas of the Conflict, IsraelPalestine. In 2004 Shoshan founded the Amsterdam-based architectural think tank FAST. Jonathan D Solomon is Associate Dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. His work explores public space and the contemporary city through design, research, and curatorial projects. Luc Speisser is managing director at the Paris office of Landor Associates, one of the premiere branding agencies in the world. Jonathan Thorpe is Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Investment Officer of Gale International. He is responsible for international and domestic project financing, investments, business planning, and strategy. Wouter Vanstiphout is the Professor of Design and Politics at TU Delft and a member of the research collective Crimson Architectural Historians. Scot Wrighton is City Manager at the Lavasa Corporation.

VOLUME is a project by ARCHIS + AMO + C-Lab + ... ARCHIS Lilet Breddels, Brendan Cormier, Jeroen Beekmans, Joop de Boer, Anais Massot, Matas Šiupšinskas, Kai Vöckler – Archis advisers Thomas Daniell, Joos van den Dool, Christian Ernsten, Edwin Gardner, Bart Goldhoorn, Rory Hyde, Vincent Schipper AMO Reinier de Graaf, James Westcott C-Lab Jeffrey Inaba, Benedict Clouette, Nicole Magnelia, Sean Connelly, Jillian Crandall, Aditya Ghosh, Igsung So – C-Lab advisers Barry Bergdoll, Gary Hattem, Jiang Jun, John S. Johnson, Lewis H. Lapham Materialized by Irma Boom and Sonja Haller ‘you talking to me?’ designed by Alexander Shoukas VOLUME’s protagonists are ARCHIS, magazine for Architecture, City and Visual Culture and its predecessors since 1929. Archis – Publishers, Tools, Interventions – is an experimental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity. www.archis.org

AMO, a research and design studio that applies architectural thinking to disciplines beyond the borders of architecture and urbanism. AMO operates in tandem with its companion company the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. www.oma.eu C-Lab, The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting is an experimental research unit devoted to the development of new forms of communication in architecture, set up as a semi-autonomous think and action tank at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. c-lab.columbia.edu VOLUME is published by Stichting Archis, the Netherlands and printed by Die Keure, Belgium. Administrative coordination Valérie Blom, Margel Nusbaumer Editorial office PO Box 14702, 1001 LE Amsterdam, The Netherlands T +31 (0)20 320 3926, F +31 (0)20 320 3927, E info@archis.org, W www.archis.org Subscriptions Bruil & Van de Staaij, Postbus 75, 7940 AB Meppel, The Netherlands, T +31 (0)522 261 303, F +31 (0)522 257 827, E volume@bruil.info, W www.bruil.info/volume Subscription rates 4 issues: €75 Netherlands, €91 World, $99 USA, Student subscription rates: €60 Netherlands, €73 World, Prices excl. VAT Cancellations policy Cancellation of subscription to be confirmed in writing one month before the end of the subscription period. Subscriptions not cancelled on time will be automatically extended for one year. Back issues Back issues of VOLUME and forerunner Archis (NL and E) are available through Bruil & van de Staaij Advertising pr@archis.org, For rates and details see: www.volumeproject.org/advertise/ General distribution Idea Books, Nieuwe Herengracht 11, 1011 RK Amsterdam, The Netherlands, T +31 (0)20 622 6154, F +31 (0)20 620 9299, idea@ideabook.nl IPS Pressevertrieb GmbH, PO Box 1211, 53334 Meckenheim, Germany, T +49 2225 8801 0, F +49 2225 8801 199, E Istulin@ips-presservertrieb.de North American Distribution Disticor Magazine Distribution Services, 695 Westney Road South, Suite 14, Ajax, Ontario, L1S 6M9, Canada, T +1 905-619-6565, F +1 905-619-2903, W www.disticor.com

VOLUME has been made possible with the support of Mondrian Foundation Amsterdam. This issue was also generously supported by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, Netherlands Partners For Water International Program as well as the Van Eesteren-Fluck & Van Lohuizen Foundation.

This issue was made possible through a close collaboration with the International New Town Institute.

Special thanks to Bin Kim, Zdravka Paskaleva, Anthe de Weerd, Kim Buisman, Elis Mutlu, Marten Kuijpers, Karin van Rooij, and Ewout Dorman. Disclaimer The editors of Volume have been careful to contact all copyright holders of the images used. If you claim ownership of any of the images presented here and have not been properly identified, please contact Volume and we will be happy to make a formal acknowledgement in a future issue.

ISSN 1574-9401, ISBN 09789077966341

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Volume 34

Editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman Contributing editors Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley Feature editor Jeffrey Inaba Co-editors for this issue INTI (Michelle Provoost, Paul Kroese) ‘you taking to me?’ insert editor Bik van der Pol & 98weeks

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